The Chinese Rubrics of the Kaifeng Codices, Part 2

 

We will now examine the Chinese rubrics in HUC 927, one of two haggadot from the Kaifeng community that are now deposited at the Hebrew Union College.  We will have help with these rubrics, as The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China, part of The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, written by Fook-Kong Wong and Dalia Yasharpour, mentions the rubrics.

The authors note that the use of Chinese rubrics in the haggadahs of the Kaifeng community, illustrates that in the 1600s, the community had a knowledge of Hebrew.  They did not merely read the prayers without comprehension of what they were saying! The Chinese negative particle: 不, or Bù, appears in this text:

HUC 927, pages 79, 83, 87 (twice) and 93.  Let us look at each one.        

page 79:

Page 83

Page 87 (twice):

Page 93:

Even without knowing a word of this text, we can say with a great deal of certainty that this books was meant to read and understood.  The large text is the Hebrew of this Haggadah, while the smaller print are rubrics in Judeo-Persian.  It is the primary text which tells the story of the escape of the Children of Israel from Egypt.  It is meant to be recited around a ritual meal - the seder.  

In most Jewish communities it was performed in the home - it is a domestic ritual.  Did the Jews of Kaifeng celebrate Passover in their homes?  We have no evidence where they had the seder.  When did the home ritual of Passover become enacted?  It is very difficult to say, as the haggadah and its use at Passover, progressed unevenly over time.  And even once more or less fixed forms of haggadot were produced, it remained (and remains!) a remarkably fluid text.  

But if we take these texts and presume a modern use, that this was used in a home, then the rubrics in Chinese make sense.  The Chinese is there to point out a difficult area of the text.  And we can see in the images of both pages 79 and 93, the liturgical language of Hebrew, is commented on in Judeo-Persian, and Chinese in the same area of the text.  Judeo-Persian was mostly likely the language of the  Kaifeng Jews before they arrived in China, and was probably used at home for some time.  Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of a shift here: the Judeo-Persian rubric was still understood by the Kaifeng Jews in the 1600s, but Chinese, a language they were more familiar with, was beginning to enter the text.

Regardless of the frame by which we view the rubrics, there are challenges to understanding them.  Take page 79:

The Chinese symbol for "no" immediately precedes the Hebrew "lo lanu" "not to us,"

Fook-Kong Wong and Dalia Yasharpour explain that scholars "initially  thought that it was used to explain the world lo; however, the next few times the word occurs, it is not written next to a negative Hebrew particle.  Rather it is found at the beginning of the sections of the Psalms 115, 116, 117, and 118, part of Hallel, 'praise' at the end of the Passover Haggadah." pages 25-6.

The authors direct us to page 20 of this manuscript, where there is evidence that errors in the text were corrected.  At the bottom of page, the scribe wrote the first word that would come on the next page, "yodeya" but it was not written on the next page:

The authors point out that it was missing at the top of page 20, although the rest of the page was written correctly.  "The scribe noticed the error and wrote the word on the right margin next to where the word should appear":

Wong and Yasharpour see these corrections, and the Chinese rubrics, as the dynamic interaction of the Kaifeng Jews and their texts.  Although the authors do not say so specifically, the Chinese 'no' symbol appears (to me) to act as a first pass through the text to correct errors - either real or perceived.  I say this with some trepidation, as the text would need to be checked more thoroughly.  Wong and Yasharpour primary goal was to add evidence that the Jews of Kaifeng, or in the very least, their synagogue religious leaders, understood the Hebrew texts they read. The authors cite a letter written by Gozani on August 25, 1712:

"They use truly Hebrew letters, which they learn to read from boyhood [girls did not learn Hebrew?] and even to write, as I have seen with my own eyes, both reading and writing; and whenever they write they use the points to indicate vowels."

Here is the link to Chapter Two, The Community's Knowledge of Hebrew, from Wong and Yasharpour work.

Next we will note the remaining texts that have Chinese rubrics.